Last week, Ona Carbonell - a two-time
Olympic medallist who leads artistic swimming's all-time world championship
medal table with 23 podium visits - called time on her sporting career.
“Today is no ordinary day. It’s a day
of change, evolution and learning. I’m happy and calm to have taken this
decision. Above all, grateful.”
That’s how Ona Carbonell announced
her retirement in an Instagram post in late May.
Just don't look for the 32-year-old
Barcelona native to ever be far from the water or the competitive artistic
swimming scene. This week, the multi-talented Carbonell is getting as much TV
time as she ever did as a competitor.
This time, it's from the pool deck on
the other side of the microphone. She's interviewing athletes as they await
their performance scores from the "Kiss & Cry" zone at the World
Aquatics Artistic Swimming World Cup 2023 - Super Final that's currently taking
place in Oviedo, Spain.
A Legendary - and Lengthy - Career
To know where Carbonell is going, you
need to know a bit about where she’s been and what she's done in artistic
swimming. A rhythmic gymnast in her early formative sporting years, she quickly
took to artistic swimming.
“Every summer since I was a child, my
family would go to the Balearic Island of
Menorca. Every day I'm there, I’m in the water for 10 hours. My parents
would say, 'You’re like a fish.'
“Artistic swimming mixes my rhythmic
gymnastics background with music and water. When I found it and I started, I
immediately understood that this is my sport.”
It didn’t take long for success to
follow. As a 16-year-old, she took her first World Championships medal in the
Women Team Technical event at the World Aquatics Championships – Melbourne
2007.
The 2009 World Champion reached her
highest Olympic success at the London 2012 Games as the Spaniard won silver in
the women's duet with Andrea Fuentes as well as bronze in the team event.
Partnering with Gemma Mengual for the
Rio 2016 Olympics, she followed this up with a fourth-place finish.
Her last Games came at the Tokyo 2020
Olympics where she competed less than one year after the birth of her child,
Kai. This helped spur her work for the betterment of sports and athletes,
passionately advocating for women's equality in returning to work.
“Sport has been on a very big and
fast evolution in many areas. From biomechanics, nutrition, physical and
psychological training,” said Carbonell. “But about mothers, we haven’t seen
this evolution in sport.”
To aid this progression, Carbonell
helped start and is now the president of the Maternity and Sport Commission for
the Spanish Olympic Committee. Soon, she
hopes among the changes to take place will be high-performance training centres
adding kindergartens so that women can continue with their elite sports
careers.
“We need more professionals that know
how to work with elite athletes that are mothers,” Carbonell added. “We need to
bring in the knowledge of doctors and the medical community to help coaches with
this. The months after pregnancy, how you can come back and compete at a high
level, we need more professionalism in this.”
The Mermaid Gets the White Jacket |
Success on Master Chef Celebrity
With two Olympic medals and then 17
World Championship podiums to her credit, Carbonell looked for a small break
from the intense artistic swimming training regimen she’d been on for a decade
plus. That’s when Master Chef Celebrity television producers approached her
about being a contestant on the show.
“I didn’t know anything about cooking
– nothing!” Carbonell recalls. “They had me take a cooking exam. I thought they
wanted me on Master Chef because they needed someone to cook fatally.”
The showrunners, though, called back
and offered her a place for the show’s third edition. That’s when the mentality
of the elite sportsperson kicked in.
“I came in with the idea of not
making a fool of myself. I started to study everything I could about
gastronomy. I begin to work with some great chefs from the best restaurants in
the world, including Jordi Rocca and Diego Guerro. I went from swimming 10
hours to cooking 10 hours a day.”
The culinary show finale pitted
Carbonell against the actress Paz Vega. With a warm consommé comprised of a
sardine belly in suspension, endive with frog legs, and a dessert she named the
Himalayan Deshielo made from cucumber, mint, apple and peach, Carbonell took
the title.
In the competition, there were many
famous personalities – from famous movie directors and actresses to comedians
and singers.
“They kept telling me, “You’re so
disciplined,” Carbonell recalled. “When I chef would tell me this is bad, I’d
say, ‘Okay, no worry. I will be better!’
“Everyone else on the show was
telling me that sport gives me this attitude for other areas in my life. This
spills out in my cooking. Sport and eating go well together, right?”
Fashion-forward Swimwear Designer
with a Climate Conscience
The other big lifelong passion in
Carbonell’s life has always been fashion and design, an area she studied at
university. Her first real forays in the field came in designing swimsuits for
Royal Spanish Swimming Federation.
“When I was competing, I designed the
suits for the Spanish federation. It was a great opportunity to design my own
swimsuits,” Carbonell said. “Now, I’m creating my own brand. It’s very
exciting. I start my collection with swimsuits and bikinis.”
The self-titled brand – Ona Carbonell
– has a distinct selling point: every fibre of the product is sourced and
created in the most environmentally-friendly way possible.
“Everything is made from plastics
from the sea. All the fabric, everything that it takes to make a swimsuit, it’s
recycled,” Carbonell said. “We think of doing everything the right way – even
the way that we dye the clothes is another process. We don’t contaminate the
environment when colouring our fabric. Every part of the process is focused on
taking care of our planet, and especially our ocean.”
With over eight million tons of
plastic entering the planet’s oceans every year, the swimwear line is driven by
eco-innovation at all levels of the supply chain.
“We work with local fishermen. They
pick up a lot of plastics in the sea. I know it’s difficult and it's more
expensive to do fashion this way, but I want to change the mentality of fashion,”
Carbonell said. “Fashion design is one of the world’s most environmentally
costly industries and has a direct impact on our climate. We need to change the
way we’re going in fashion and commerce.
“I do everything in my country, in my
city of Barcelona, added Carbonell. “Proximity, it's important.”
The fledgling sportswear designer
concedes that the business model isn’t tailored to maximising profits.
“Maybe for the moment, our business
model isn’t the most sustainable from a profit perspective. But I want to start
little by little. But what I really want and am after is changing the mentality
of how we do fashion.
“Already, we’re starting to work on
some exciting collaborations with some very big and important names in the
space. I can only hint at what this will be right now. But there are some
really good projects underway. Stay tuned!”
Back at the Pool Beside the Kiss
& Cry Couches, Microphone in Hand
In artistic swimming, you express.
The athletes are not shy around the camera. Carbonell is not an exception to
this rule.
Working in media and broadcasting is
something that a recently retired swimmer has dabbled in before.
“I always want to be close to sport,
with artistic swimming. It’s my world, it’s my passion, my life. But now it’s
good to see it from a different perspective. Now I don’t have to hold my breath
and be so cold, so it’s all good,” she says, laughing.
“I’m close with sport, just in a
different way. I don’t know if I want to pursue this full-time. Right now, my
priority is on being a mother and projects like my clothing brand. But in the
future, why not?”
Written by Torin Koos, World Aquatics
Communication Manager
Image Source: Clive Rose/Getty Images
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